Barack Obama’s mixed messages

President Barack Obama isn’t just grappling with what feels like an endless foreign policy nightmare around the world. Now he’s got one hell of a messaging problem at home.

The United States will not intervene in foreign crises directly — or indirectly by supplying weapons and assistance — except when it does. Obama needs explicit authorization and funding from Congress in order to escalate American involvement in ongoing conflicts around the world — except when he doesn’t.

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The president’s order to step up direct military support to Iraq’s Kurds, who the Pentagon acknowledged Monday are getting more weapons, ammunition and other help to fend off the Sunni terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is a mirror image of his much more reticent policy on Syria’s rebels.

Obama and his top aides spent years debating what to do about helping Syria’s anti-government fighters, before the president ultimately elected to ask Congress earlier this summer for $500 million to authorize an official program to arm and train “vetted” units to take on Syrian President Bashar Assad.

So sometimes the president can rush weapons right away to embattled fighters in the Middle East. Sometimes he can’t. Sometimes Obama can act on his own authority. Sometimes he needs Congress to sign off and provide funding.

The good news for Obama is that the apparent mixed messages don’t seem to matter to many American voters. The bad news is the inconsistent signals mean quite a lot to the Middle East, the world and to Obama’s own legacy, which he’s built on getting the United States out of Iraq — not entangled in other conflict there.

“The American public, as a general rule, is not interested in either one,” said former Ambassador Frederic Hof, now a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. “He’s got to worry about how it’s perceived in the region. In terms of domestic politics, I don’t think that outside the Beltway he needs to worry about being a magnet for criticism about some perceived inconsistency.”

But the overseas messaging could still cause major problems for Obama’s broader strategic goal in Iraq, which is to get an inclusive new government that will entice disaffected Sunnis away from supporting ISIL and enable Baghdad to begin to reclaim its lost territory.

“U.S. efforts to arm the Kurds as well as airdrop food and water to Yazidis took a few weeks to carry out. In Syria, it’s taken three years just to talk about arming the rebels in any substantial way, but seeming halfhearted way,” said Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The dichotomy of the way Obama has acted will only complicate the way regional players hear the United States when it speaks from now on.

“This is going to play into the jihadists narrative that after 9/11, the U.S. is actually targeting and encouraging the slaughter of Sunnis,” Tabler warned. “This, combined with our outreach to Iran, which has encouraged sectarian slaughter and oppression of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, is going to severely undermine Obama’s goal of reaching ‘disaffected Sunnis’ as part of dealing with ISIL.”

And for now, Washington is sticking by its reliance on a new Baghdad government and not on an American military answer to the crisis. Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville Jr., a top Pentagon operations officer, told reporters on Monday that he has no plans to step up the pace of the American air campaign against ISIL or broaden its targeting beyond two avenues that Obama set out last week.

For one, the president wants American warplanes to keep ISIL’s fighters away from Erbil and to try to protect tens of thousands of Yazidi religious minorities who have fled up Mount Sinjar in the northwest. The Navy and Air Force are not targeting ISIL’s headquarters or logistics, Mayville said, and he said he did not expect the current operations to have a strategic effect on the wider crisis.

Obama also offered his backing to the new prime minister of Iraq Monday, calling the leadership switch in the embattled country “a promising step forward.”

Obama said he urged Haider al-Abadi, the nominee to take over for Nouri al-Maliki, to form an inclusive government.

“I pledged our support,” Obama said from Martha’s Vineyard, where he is vacationing for the next two weeks. “Meanwhile, I urge all Iraqi leaders to work peacefully through the political process in the days ahead.”

Administration officials don’t concede any inconsistency in the Obama approaches to the Kurds and the Syrian rebels. In fact, officials at the Pentagon and State Department both said Monday that American support had been flowing to both places for some time.

“This isn’t anything new. We talked about this last week,” said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. “We’ve been talking for a long time about how we’re working with the Kurds, working with the Peshmerga. This isn’t in any way new.”

There are also important qualitative differences between Iraq’s Kurds — who are stalwart American allies in the Middle East and represent a rare rock of stability in a turbulent region — and Syria’s rebels, who include ISIL itself.

“There’s a huge difference,” said Douglas Ollivant, a senior national security fellow with the New America Foundation. “No one is concerned about the Kurds losing control of these arms on a large scale. That was a big concern with the Free Syrian Army. There’s zero concern about that with the Kurds. Any arms that are sent to the Kurds will stay with the Kurds.”

Do Obama or his aides need to attempt to make those kinds of distinctions or give a more detailed case about their outlook on the Middle East crises?

“It’s not my job to help the administration explain themselves,” he said.